I watched Caprice tonight and, while I wasn’t as totally blown away with it as domino, I like it more the further I think about it (which I suppose is fitting, given certain events in the film).

It’s not an original observation, but Mouret is clearly a gifted physical comedian in the style of Tati - the setpiece with his broken leg is a great one, and even his small facial expressions are charming almost to a fault. These overtly comic moments are where Mouret shines the strongest as an actor.

But where he really surprised me was as a writer - I think the script is much deeper than it appears on the surface. My thoughts aren’t extraordinarily coherent at the moment, but there’s a lot here about not only the illusion of male fantasy (which domino has expounded upon in his opening post) but also the nature of monogamous love, the apparent difficulty of gender-disparate friendships, and the danger of the parts of ourselves we may not even know exist. It’s for this last concern that Mouret’s Clément traps his own present in a kind of living memory, in contrast with Caprice, who performs in a collaborative play set thousands of years in the future. (I love the title of Clément’s play: “The Unfortunate Need for Love.” It’s a fantastic summation of a character whose feelings even he finds impossible to comprehend.)

But Caprice’s theater scene is absolutely transcendent. It’s not only a diegetic nod to what’s come before (Caprice and her friend buy Clément and Thomas drinks in the bar to break their gender role; the play mentions such a blurring of gender) but also a summation of the film’s thematic questions: what does an “intersection” involving more than two people look like? Is it something we aren’t equipped to handle? Or is it our next evolutionary step? I have conflicted emotions about polyamory myself - are those because of something inherent within me, or is there a societal restriction I should be able to move past? At the risk of not answering any of these questions, let me just sum up the scene by saying that it’s astonishingly beautiful to look at.

And that’s just one of the gorgeous shots here - the pan down to the flowers blooming outside of Alicia’s apartment, the aquarium backlighting a dangerously intimate conversation, Clément’s phone ringing after what could be a final cut to black. It’s a pretty film even when not showing off, but those flashier moments are just impossible not to admire.

I’ll definitely have to check out some of Mouret’s earlier work. Even if they’re not as thematically rich or beautifully shot as this one, I’m sure they’ll be a lovely way to spend an evening.